Henri d'Orléans: I cannot remain silent

Henri d'Orléans is a claimant to the throne of France. He has a remarkable noble lineage which stretches back over 1200 years. He has spoken out passionately against a new policy of integration being considered by the French government (hat tip: Gallia Watch).

The integration policy is a radical one. It suggests recasting French identity so that it is no longer based on the historic French nation. For instance, it recommends:

recognition of all languages in an identical manner. France must acknowledge the Arabo-Oriental dimension of her identity.

Tiberge at Gallia Watch writes:

Another recommendation: "a new Panthéon" and new streets. The authors state:

"History as taught makes references to great men who are for the most part white and heterosexual. Therefore, it is highly desirable for the "pantheon" of figures who incarnate great movements, great moments and the dynamics of pluralities in society to evolve."

Henri d'Orléans hit back in a speech that, although a little long for a blog post, is worth reading in full:

Is it necessary to recall what everybody knows: the extraordinary prophecies of George Orwell? It is true that it will always have been easier and more exciting to destroy a world rich from its culture, its efforts, and to erase forever the memory of the original roots of the people, whoever they may be. All of this on the pretext of providing a false new joie de vivre for future slaves, forced to choose between submission to the dictatorship of political correctness and absolute exclusion.

If France never succumbed to the blows, often fatal, that have been dealt her, it is because she still has a soul. At times, so dark and deep was the night of History, we might have thought that France had lost this soul, but in reality it was still there, riveted to the body of this old land where so many of our dead lie. The dead who fell at Bouvines, Rocroi, Denain, Jemmapes, Waterloo, Sedan, on the Marne and at Verdun, for France.

It so happens that in recent times there are those who try to re-write the History of our country without all these dead whom they find cumbersome, without Christianity that brought our country to the baptismal fonts and even fashioned its physiognomy, without those kings and two emperors, hardly "republicans", who made of France what it is.

Yes, some would like our country to be completely different from what it is, or more precisely, they would like it to be France no more. France should apologize for having been France, for not having been born in the form of a secular social republic in the 5th century after Jesus-Christ, for having spread its power beyond the sea, for having waged war and peace on the entire continent, for having built cathedrals and castles. Finally, the French people should blush for having entrusted their destiny for centuries to "white heterosexual males" who - it seems - clutter up the Pantheon and our history books, and who deserve to be chased out. And yet it was essentially "foreign", "impure" blood, as the Marseillaise sings, that flowed in the veins of the kings who made France, but for nothing in the world would they have touched this country of which they were the depositaries through the coronation.

Today, to facilitate the integration of millions of foreigners who live in France, "specialists" are suggesting that another France be forged from whole cloth, more in conformity with the ideological dogmas of which they are the dangerous propagandists.

It happens that I am the head of a family that, for more than a millennium, incarnated this France that they are claiming to abolish, and by virtue of this, I cannot remain silent. Even if, for obvious historic reasons, I am not a republican, never, since our return from exile, has the legitimacy that we represent opposed the will of the people; but this respect for republican legality does not exempt me from my duties as head of the royal house of France, from my duties as a Frenchman. The love I bring to France impels me to shout publicly here my indignation against his monstrous plan forged in the secrecy of ministerial antechambers.

I have noted the remarks of the president of the Republic, who declared that these proposals in no way expressed the position of the government, but I am awaiting, above all, from the president, an unquestionable condemnation of this report and its contents that aim not to change France, but to drown her like another Atlantis. I don't know what "to make France in a 'we' that is inclusive and united" (sic) means, but what I understand, and I am not the only one, is that the authors of this report are trying to undo France.

It is therefore in a state of deep distress and alarm shared by a majority of Frenchmen that I address here all of France, all those who love the country of which they are the heirs but also the depositaries. Over and beyond politics, beyond anything my person might represent to sincere republicans, even beyond my religious convictions that forge my identity but that are not shared by all, there is France and we cannot allow her to be undone.

Not a thought revolution

Clive Palmer is an Australian mining magnate who threw a lot of money into the last election and won a seat.

In his maiden speech to parliament Palmer called for a "thought revolution." Unfortunately, rather than proposing anything new, he presented yet again the ideal of an "economic man" whose first commitment is to economic matters. He said,

Australia needs a revolution in the way we think, in the way we boost our wealth and economy for all our citizens...Our main concern needs to rest with how we can grow and expand our economy and create more wealth.

This is just more of the same from right-liberals. Left-liberals too, when you get to the crux of what they believe, think that a professional career is the main prize in life.

However, in another speech Palmer did reference the concept of fidelity. He got it disastrously wrong, but it's interesting that it still has significance for him.

Fidelity, as I understand the concept, is a turning toward the relationships we are made for, and which call us to service as an expression of who we are. There are many such relationships, but one of them is to our ancestors.

Palmer had this to say:

We need to make sure we can generate more prosperity and growth for Australians so that families have a better standard of living.

We have a very lucky country and we're standing on the shoulders of our ancestors to carry our tradition forward to the next century.

Again, there's that ideal of the "economic man" - that what matters is success in the market. But nonetheless Palmer, for rhetorical effect at least, still invokes the idea of having a debt to previous generations and a responsibility to carry forward a tradition. There is still some semblance of an idea of fidelity toward one's ancestors.

But he has misunderstood the tradition he is to carry forward. Federation of the Australian states was argued for on the basis that economic considerations shouldn't outweigh ties of ancestral kinship. For instance, the following poem was recited at federation meetings by a future PM, Alfred Deakin:

From all division let our land be free,
For God has made her one: complete she lies
Within the unbroken circle of the skies,
And round her indivisible the sea
Breaks on her single shore; while only we,
Her foster children, bound with sacred ties
Of one dear blood, one storied enterprise,
Are negligent of her integrity.—
Her seamless garment, at great Mammon's nod,
With hands unfilial we have basely rent,
With petty variance our souls are spent,
And ancient kinship under foot is trod

Palmer is reversing the message of the generation that federated Australia: he wants to steer course according to "great Mammon's nod" even if this harms the ties held sacred by the federation poet.

Jolted and startled

The Daily Mail ran a story a little while ago about a woman, Sharon Parsons, who had come to terms with being childless. What did Sharon Parsons think she had missed out on? I thought her answer interesting:

Yet, it seems to me that those with a family often have more tangible stages punctuating their lives: there's the day they become parents; later, they may become grandparents; and inbetween there are all the defining events that will be remembered and celebrated, such as the one my friend was enjoying so much, the marriage of her child.

Perhaps, in a few years, she will also see the birth of her first grandchild and another chapter of that particular family's life will begin as their lineage continues onward into the future. It's something people like me will never know.

And that - for me, at least - is a jolting part of being childless. However pretentious it may sound, there's the startling fact that my husband and I have severed the thread in our personal ancestry (unless, of course, he should decide to run off with a fertile 20-something).

Despite our respective nephews and nieces taking up the family baton, he and I know that we are not passing anything of ourselves on to future generations.

After an infinite genealogical timeline - impossible to imagine - we have drawn the mark in the sand. Enough. No more. Our bloodline stops here.

What Sharon Parsons is doing here is recognising a good that is not the usual liberal one of autonomy. In fact, she is recognising that she does not exist merely as an autonomous individual, but as part of a family lineage that extends back through countless generations. She finds it startling to be faced with the loss of this lineage "after an infinite genealogical timeline". Ancestral connections do matter to her.

And how did she come to be childless? The usual way for a woman of her generation. She had always wanted to have children:

I always wanted and assumed I'd have a brood of my own. I grew up imagining an idyllic family life and, naturally, I only ever thought about the special times - playing with my children on a sunny beach, seeing them set off on their first day at school, celebrating birthdays and Christmas down the years.

My offspring would - of course! - be beautiful, well-behaved and clever, and would grow up to become happy, well-adjusted and brilliant young adults with fulfilling careers and eventually wonderful children of their own.

But she bought into the idea that a woman's 20s should be devoted to a single girl lifestyle and that family could be deferred until her 30s:

I spent my 20s having a fabulous time and building a career. But I spent my 30s - when I thought babies would surely be the next thing to come along, especially as all my friends were reproducing - slowly coming to terms with the fact motherhood simply wasn't my God-given right.

The deferral of parenthood till some time in your 30s does increase the risk of either not being able to have children or limiting your choice of family size. It would be better for our culture if we shifted back to the idea of marrying and having children, or at least beginning the process, whilst we are still in our 20s.

(To forestall some criticisms here, I do understand that there are people who want to do this but who find it difficult to meet someone, particularly within the current culture of relationships.)

History in the remaking

Royal Auto has the largest circulation of any monthly magazine in Australia. It's read by half the adult population here in Victoria. So it's significant that the feature article in this month's edition (August 2009) is on the topic of history, ancestry and identity.

The article looks at a historical re-enactment society in the Victorian city of Ballarat. The young members of this society are quite articulate when it comes to explaining why they devote so much time to their hobby. For instance, David Waldron believes that it connects him to his heritage:

His participation ... is a way of "bridging the disjuncture from my heritage - my own history. I am recreating that sense of connection."

Another member of the society, Fred Cheney, an English and history teacher, has a theory about the loss of Western identity:

Fred ... has tried to connect with Asian spirituality but found immersing himself in the essentials of northern European culture is the better fit pyschologically. He says the transported gene pool of white Australia set his social lineage adrift.

"And in the absence of knowledge about our own ancestral roots, we tend to project our internal indigenous sense onto the exotic other - the Aborigines or the Asian races," he says. "Through these processes we are reclaiming our own roots. For me, enacting the Viking period is a way of engaging with my racial heritage. We get the sense it is still there. The costumes are profoundly respectful of our ancestors, but by wearing them you get that instant consciousness of The Great Then."

There are women involved too. Anna says of history that,

"reading about it just isn't enough." And best of all is the payoff in a real sense of connection. "This sense of tribal community is vital to sustain us now because it has a real integrity. We do operate as a tribe or an extended family."

If this sounds a little politically incorrect, it's because it runs against the grain of orthodox liberalism. According to liberal orthodoxy there is no collective good, only an immense set of self-chosen individual life paths. The overall aim is to achieve an autonomy in which we self-determine every aspect of who we are. We don't choose our ethnicity or our ancestry, so these are thought of negatively as impediments to the self-creating, blank slate individual. Furthermore, because liberals associate the West with power and dominance, they see Western forms of ethnic identity as being constructed for the oppression of others. So Western identity gets tagged as supremacist or discriminatory, whereas non-Western identity is tied much more positively to resistance to Western cultural and political dominance.

So there is a profound rejection of modern liberal orthodoxy when the Ballarat history players declare that their own Western ancestry is authentic and indispensable to who they are.

I personally have no desire to dress up like a Viking. Nor do I think that re-enactment is the most effective way of challenging the liberal status quo. But I do agree with the Ballarat history players that a sense of our ancestry and roots is important in forming our self-identity. It deepens and enriches our sense of who we are. It places us within a distinct tradition, so that we identify with a set of cultural ideals and achievements, rather than always being outsiders who are not actively involved in reproducing a culture of our own.

If liberal theory treats such an identity, at least for Westerners, as wholly negative, then this only shows that liberal theory is inadequate - that it limits too severely what can be expressed within our self-identity.

The best of both worlds

Is the aim of my life to be autonomous? Is this what makes me free? If so, there must be no significant aspect of my life which I cannot choose for myself.

This is a problem when it comes to ethnicity. Ethnicity appears to be inherited as a tradition rather than being self-determined. Therefore, if I want to be autonomous I have to either "liberate" myself from the "prison" of ethnicity; or else I have to think of ethnicity as being something that I myself might construct - as something individual and subjective, a "personal narrative".

But is ethnicity really experienced by individuals as something negative, as an impediment to freedom? And is it really experienced as a self-constructed narrative, rather than as a real, objective tradition?

If the answer to both questions is yes, then how do we explain the case of Nirpal Dhaliwal. He is a man of Indian descent raised in Great Britain. He stayed away from India for many years due to its economic backwardness. But now that it is more economically advanced, he believes he can enjoy there both the modern lifestyle trappings as well as the sense of ethnic attachment:

So many Indians like me, born and raised in the West, are returning, wanting to reconnect with their motherland as much as seek their fortunes ...

It is now a society where we can be as modern and cosmopolitan as we want while immersing ourselves in its ancient culture.

India wields an irresistible ancestral pull - and is now the place where we can most truly be ourselves.

If autonomy theory were right, then Dhaliwal would experience India's ancient culture and ancestral pull as an oppression. He would feel burdened. Instead, Dhaliwal feels most true to himself when connected to his ethnic homeland.

Then there is the case of Melbourne artist Michael Peck. In a recent newspaper article, Peck explained the inspiration for his paintings:

Peck said he wanted his work to convey the experience of refugees and migrants trying to fit into a new culture.

"The figures in my paintings are there, but they always seem out of place ..."

Peck began exploring the idea after a difficult year in London. While there he taught art to underprivileged migrant children and found many were "lost" because they lacked a connection to their cultural roots ...

"Most of my work focuses on the idea of cultural displacement or dislocation, the concept of identity and how our identity is formed ..." (Diamond Valley Leader, June 18, 2008)

Again, if autonomy theory were right, then refugees ought not to feel lost at all, but unburdened. They should either experience a liberation from their cultural roots, or else control the process in terms of their personal narrative.

Instead, we are told that the refugees feel disconnected, lost and out of place.

Shouldn't then the aim be to enable people, as far as possible, to continue to enjoy a connection to their own ethnic tradition?

This requires a rethink of autonomy theory. It doesn't work to make autonomy an overriding principle in life; this doesn't bring either freedom or authenticity, but rather loss and displacement. A better option would be to think of autonomy as one good in life, to be balanced intelligently with other goods.

It's not enough to be right

Andrew Bolt is easily the most influential right wing journalist here in Victoria. It's very important to understand, though, that he is not a conservative.

This isn't very hard to prove. Take a column he wrote recently for the Herald Sun, titled "Racism kills our heritage" (4/8/04). The column concerns two Aboriginal bark etchings, which were collected by a white landowner in the 1850s and which were then acquired by British museums.

The British museums returned the etchings to Australia on loan, but an Aboriginal tribe has laid claim to them and has won a legal order preventing their return to Britain.

Personally, I think it's wrong to accept the items on loan and then seize them. So I don't disagree with Andrew Bolt's basic position, that the etchings should go back to Britain. It is more the particular reasoning employed by Andrew Bolt to support his position which reveals his very straightforward liberalism.

The Aborigines claimed that they wanted to keep the etchings because, "We believe strongly that (the artefacts) connect us to our country, our culture and ancestry".

Now, the Aborigines are merely expressing here a normal conservative sentiment. Most ethnic groups feel a special connection to certain artefacts. Certainly, Anglo-Australians dislike it when prized artefacts are sold overseas. In fact, just recently there was even a huge outcry over the possible sale of a Don Bradman cricket cap to overseas buyers!

Imagine how important the bark etchings must be to the Bendigo Aborigines. These etchings must be amongst the precious few items connecting these Aborigines to their own history and ancestry. No wonder they would prefer to keep these etchings closer to home than Great Britain.

But Andrew Bolt doesn't see this. Instead, he claims that the Aborigines should have been "laughed to scorn" for trying to keep the etchings and he condemns them for being "racist".

Significantly, Bolt considers the Aborigines guilty of a "New Racism" which "insists that we are always members of a tribe". Now, this is pretty harsh: Bolt is telling a tribe of Aborigines that they are racist for considering themselves to be a tribe of Aborigines!

And here we come to the really telling point. Bolt goes on to state that the mistake made by the Aborigines is to forget,

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race. In this New Racism, we're driven back into tribes.

This is as intense, condensed and pure a statement of liberalism as you're ever likely to come across.

Remember, the liberal first principle is the idea that to be fully human we must create who we are out of our own reason and will. The point of liberal politics is therefore to remove any impediments to an individual freedom to create ourselves in any direction.

One such impediment to a self-created identity is our ethnicity. We don't get to choose our ethnic identity as it's something we're simply born into. This makes it illegitimate under the logic of liberalism.

Andrew Bolt has simply applied the basic liberal principle in a consistent way. He has declared an ethnic identity to be "racist" and therefore illegitimate, because for him as a liberal our equal humanity depends on our freedom to "make our own identities".

True conservatism is actually a resistance to such ideas. It is a defence of important forms of human identity and connectedness which are placed under assault by liberal first principles.

A true conservative, therefore, would admire the stubborn connection felt by the Bendigo Aborigines to their own distinctive traditions. He would not condemn these Aborigines for failing to discard an inherited group identity in favour of individual, self-created ones.

Andrew Bolt is therefore clearly on the liberal side of politics, rather than the conservative one. This doesn't mean that he isn't right wing, but that he is a right-wing liberal rather than a right-wing conservative.

The dominance of liberal principles, even on the right-wing of politics, explains why liberalism has been able to march forward, largely unchallenged, in Western societies. There was hardly anyone in the political class who stood outside of liberal first principles, and who could therefore take a principled stance against liberal policies.

That's why it's so important that the younger generation of conservatives is able to distinguish between right-wing forms of liberalism and a genuine conservatism. It's no use rejecting left liberalism by joining the camp of right-liberalism: both camps are dominated by principles which make traditional national, ethnic, family and moral identities and beliefs illegitimate.

To make real progress the first step is to free ourselves from the dominance of liberal first principles.

(First published at Conservative Central, 07/08/2004)

Singer not so doctrinaire

Jill Singer is not as doctrinaire a leftist as I thought she was. First there was her comment late last year in support of traditional men:

Just as men hanker for women who are more gorgeous but less clever than themselves, women will generally keep seeking men who can provide for their family in material terms.

I hear many women complain they feel dudded in their relationships, that gender equality means women's workload is made unbearable by both work and home duties.

Their husbands apparently benefit from their wife's income but don't put in more at home themselves.

We're not just talking about caring for children, but old-fashioned domestic duties that men used to do such as household repairs. Sure, there are lots of good handymen out there, but they're not married to anyone I know.

Now she has written an article on the importance of our home country and culture and the dislocation of migrants living in a foreign land.

She begins her piece by quoting an ancient Indian text:

One of the paths to happiness, according to an ancient Indian text, is not to leave your homeland permanently.

The wisdom of this has struck me during my visit to Vietnam.

Singer joined a party of Vietnamese men and women and noted:

... it was remarkable to witness their love of country ... The people here are so enthusiastic about their culture and prosperity that I feel sympathy for the Vietnamese who were forced to make their lives elsewhere in the wake of the Vietnam War.

One of the Vietnamese women has a sister living in Sydney who wants to return home but won't because of her Australian born children. According to Singer,

The expatriate sister longs for her family in Vietnam, but her children are Australian.

She lives a life amputated from her culture.

Of those Vietnamese refugees who cannot return home because of "newly formed bonds" Singer writes:

They have gained new homes and new opportunities, but they are also missing out on so much.

Nor does Singer exclude her own kind from the appeal of native land and culture. She writes of those Australians who move overseas that:

Being an outsider can be exhilarating as a visitor, but can prove tiresome over time.

She tells us too that,

I have often dreamed of living elsewhere ... And then I think of being permanently away from home, friends and family, and the appeal quickly fades. Travel is a tonic, but home is a haven.

The conclusion Singer draws from all this is not a conservative one. She argues that refugees wouldn't lightly forsake their homelands and therefore should be judged as genuinely in need rather than as aspiring to a better lifestyle.

It's a pity Singer didn't draw the more obvious, albeit bolder, conclusion, namely that those claiming refugee status should be resettled in places most similar to their home country and culture. This would be an effective way to test whether refugee claimants are genuine, and it would also mean that genuine refugees would suffer the least degree of cultural dislocation.

To illustrate this point, consider the case of a white farmer driven out of Zimbabwe. Would he feel more at home resettled in rural Australia or in a suburb of Beijing? It would seem perverse to place him in Beijing, where both he and his children could never feel part of the mainstream. Yet the refugee policies in place today don't consider this issue, and claimants are resettled without consideration of their prospects for a cultural identity.

Finally, it's worth noting that Singer's article represents something of a return to a traditional view. Throughout European history exile from your homeland was considered an unfortunate fate. Dante wrote in The Divine Comedy of the exile that:

You will leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You will know how salty
another's bread tastes and how hard it
is to ascend and descend
another's stairs ...

In Njal's Saga (written in Iceland in the 1200s) the hero Gunnar is sent into exile for three years. As he is leaving, though, his horse stumbles, causing him to look homeward. He decides to stay, even though this will leave him an outlaw and lead to his death.

Finally, I'm reminded too of Elizabeth Fenton, who travelled with her husband to Australia in the 1820s. In the Arab ship she sailed on were two men, both exiles of a kind, whom she pitied. Of the first she wrote:

He makes me quite melancholy. He is English by name and complexion, but his tastes, manners, and his scruples, not to say his religion, are Arab. He is the son of a Scotch clergyman, but for many years has been leading his present life, trading between Muscat and Mozambique ... Poor fellow!

The second was from Greece:

Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it, - a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice. Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

So Jill Singer, in writing of love of homeland and the loss of exile, is contributing to a longstanding tradition within Western culture.

Becoming the embodied subject

If you look at an Australian $50 note, you will see a picture of David Unaipon, an Aboriginal writer and inventor. Below this picture Unaipon is briefly quoted as follows:

As a full-blooded member of my race I think I may claim to be the first – but I hope, not the last – to produce an enduring record of our customs, beliefs and imaginings.

David Unaipon appears to be an admirable representative of the Australian Aborigines. However, what strikes me about his appearance on our currency is the double standard involved. Only an Aborigine could get away with expressing pride in his race, culture and traditions; if a white Australian were to do the same, he would not get his face on the $50 note, but would probably be denounced as a racist or bigot.

So why do we have such a double standard? Why is the majority population expected to have no serious pride in their own ethnicity, whilst at the same time celebrating the ethnicity of others?

The answer, I believe, has to do with the basic philosophy adopted by white intellectuals, namely liberalism. Liberalism asserts that to be human, we must be free to create who we are through our own will and reason. This means that we are most human when we are least subject to any qualities which might pre-set our identity or influence our choices.

To put this another way, liberals prefer to see the individual as an atomised, thinking and choosing mind, unconstrained by any inherited nature or tradition.

In a discussion at View from the Right, the American traditionalist, Jim Kalb, offered a similar explanation for the double standard:

My guess is that it’s a consequence of the nature of the liberal individual, which is the same as the Cartesian ego—a disembodied subject with no qualities at all other than the free-floating ability to have experiences and make choices.... The Cartesian ego isn’t really part of the world of experience. How, after all, could something with no qualities be embodied? So perhaps there’s a feeling that it’s more legitimate for Third World types, who don’t seem to be free floating Cartesian egos, to be embodied and thus part of the world of experience. The feeling then is that white people are Cartesian abstractions while nonwhites are vibrant concrete realities. [Emphasis added.]

If Jim Kalb is right, it would help to explain why some liberals are so willing to accept the demise of the West. For instance, Jens Orback, the Swedish Democracy Minister, said earlier this year,

We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.

Orback has already accepted the future dominance of Islam and a Muslim population in his own country. Perhaps he does so because he can only conceive of the existing Swedish population as being disembodied liberal subjects, whereas the non-Western immigrants carry a real, embodied tradition and identity – and therefore represent something of greater weight and worth in the world.

Could there be a clue to a strategy for Western survival in this? Perhaps what the Western remnant needs to do is to emphasise strongly that they do not belong within the category of “liberal subject”. If the remnant were to insist clearly enough on a separate identity as an embodied subject, then perhaps Western liberals would accept that we too belong in a different category to the liberal individual, just as non-whites do.

This would mean asserting, as a matter of course, that we embody qualities which we have not chosen for ourselves: it would mean, for instance, recognising the importance to us of our manhood or womanhood and of our particular national or ethnic traditions.

There was a time when we did do this as a matter of course. The further back in time you go, the less the influence of liberalism, and the more clearly you find expressions of European ‘embodiment’.

Let me give just two examples. Jorgen Jorgenson and Elizabeth Fenton were both settlers in Tasmania in the 1820s and 30s. Jorgenson had already had a colourful career. He was born and raised a Dane, but in 1809, when Denmark and England were at war, he led a coup against the Danish administration in Iceland, with the support of some English merchants. He ruled the country for two months, before being deposed.

Whilst in power, Jorgenson wrote letters to Icelandic officials, demanding that they pledge their loyalty. Here is how one Icelandic official, Jon Guthmundsson, replied to Jorgenson:

Who are you? You are born a Danish subject … But what are you now? You have not become a British subject, yet you have ceased to be what you were and should be, and also ceased to be a human being. Whoever and whatever you are, you have insulted me by assuming me foolish enough to be seduced, cowardly enough to be fearful, and dishonest enough to ignore honour and duty.

The Icelandic official berates Jorgenson for his betrayal of his native country and for the ambiguous status of his identity. He does not see such ambiguity as a liberation from the “prison of ethnicity”, but as a loss of an essential human quality. The Icelandic official is a fully embodied white subject.

Jorgenson was already living in Tasmania when Elizabeth Fenton set sail in 1828 to become a settler there. Her husband had served as a soldier in India, so she began her journey from India in a Muslim vessel, the Hamoud Shaw. After praising the Arab captain she wrote,

He has one European on board who holds the office of chief mate. He makes me quite melancholy. He is English by name and complexion, but his tastes, manners and his scruples, not to say his religion, are Arab.

He is the son of a Scotch clergyman, but for many years has been leading his present life, trading between Muscat and Mozambique. Muscat is, in his imagination, what Paris is to a Frenchman ... His converse turns on murders, executions, shipwrecks, his reading is the works of Voltaire and Paine, of which he has read just enough to unsettle his belief.

Poor fellow! though it always makes me nervous to hear him speak, I pity him too; he may not always have been what he now is; has he been made this [way] by disappointment or alienation from the humanising relationships of life?

Elizabeth Fenton was similarly disconcerted by the existence of a Greek convert amongst the crew:

The crew are a mixture of Bengalees, Arabs and negro slaves. Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it! – a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice.

Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

Couldn’t we apply this last sentence to your average disembodied modern liberal: “he would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors”? Elizabeth Fenton, though, pre-dates this mentality; for her, a connection to ancestry and to homeland is the natural condition of man, disrupted only by “alienation from the humanising relationships of life”.

She too associates the human with the embodied subject, and she does so with the confidence which we need to return to if we are to clearly distinguish ourselves from the suicidal category of “disembodied liberal subject”.

Ignatieff's lesson from the crypt

One interesting result in the Canadian election was the victory of Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard academic who has written widely on the issue of nationalism.

Ignatieff set out his views on nationalism in his book Blood and Belonging, published in 1993. In this work Ignatieff explains that whilst he himself is a cosmopolitan, he nonetheless supports a civic nationalism.

Why a civic nationalism? Ignatieff is a liberal. As such, he believes that individuals should be self-defined. Therefore he rejects ethnic nationalism (in which national identity is based on a common ancestry, culture, language and so on) because,

Ethnic nationalism claims ... that an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited not chosen. It is the national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community.

The kind of nationalism preferred by Ignatieff is the “official” one operating today based on a common citizenship. He believes that it functions within liberal ideals for the following reason:

According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community.

For traditionalists, the Ignatieff view seems radical. It spells the end of the European ethnies, as it opens up membership of a nation to anyone who can obtain citizenship. It allows no principled basis for maintaining the distinct European peoples and cultures.

However, the unfortunate fact is that Ignatieff is actually at the more conservative end of the liberal debate on nationalism. Ignatieff still believes in making a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Many liberals believe that such a distinction is immoral according to liberal principle.

And they have a point. After all, it is a myth that most people choose their citizenship any more than they choose their ethny. In other words, most of us are born into membership of a civic nation, just as much as we are into an ethnic identity.

Furthermore, civic nations still place restrictions on who may or may not become citizens. This means that civic nations are practising “discrimination”, by excluding some people from certain benefits and impeding what they can choose to become.

The more radical position, of rejecting even a civic nationalism, has been explained in a more difficult, academic style by Jeffrey Friedman as follows:

In attacking the privileges of birth, political or economic, liberals of both classical and contemporary vintage give voice to the conviction that one’s humanity, rather than accidental circumstances, should determine one’s rights.

This egalitarianism is traduced by the inescapable particularism of the modern state. A truly liberal society would encompass all human beings. It would extend welfare benefits to all humankind, not just to those born within arbitrary boundaries... (Critical Review, Spring 1996)

The former Australian Prime Mininster, Paul Keating, supports the radical Friedman view. He has lashed out at civic nationalism, complaining that its “exclusiveness” relies on,

constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is “citizenship”. Who is in and who is out.

Not all liberals, then, support a civic nationalism. Why does Ignatieff?

There are two factors involved in Ignatieff’s answer. The first is straightforward. Ignatieff declares that he is not a nationalist at all, but a cosmopolitan and that cosmopolitans require a strong nation state to enforce social stability and human rights. In his own words,

It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted ... The cosmopolitanism of the great cities – London, Los Angeles, New York, London – depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation state ...

In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation-states to provide security and civility for their citizens.”

I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives.

This is not an illogical argument for a liberal to make, but it’s quite a formal and dry kind of reasoning. There’s a more direct and personal reason given for Ignatieff’s reluctance to totally discard the nation state later in his book when he describes his visit to Ukraine.

Ignatieff’s great grandfather was a Russian aristocrat who bought an estate in Ukraine in 1860 when he was the Russian ambassador to Constantinople. The Ignatieffs lost control of the estate in 1917, and they became Russian emigres who settled in Canada.

When Michael Ignatieff visited Ukraine after it gained independence from the USSR, he toured the estate once owned by his ancestors and described his experiences as follows,

Then to the church, where the bell is tolling and the parishioners are assembling for a special pannihida in memory of our ancestors.

... Now another feeling began to steal over me, a feeling that, like it or not, this was where my family story began, this was where my graves were. Like a tunneler, I had gone through suffocation, and I had tunneled myself back to at least one of my belongings. I could say to myself: the half-seen track of my past does have its start, and I can return to it.

The choir sings, the priest names my father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, the names, some of them Anglo-Saxon, peeking through the seams of his prayers, the choir and their voices singing, the sound filling this church my great-grandfather built.

The priest then shows Ignatieff the crypt in which his aristocratic ancestors are buried and he learns that under the communists it was used as a slaughterhouse. There are cuts made by butchers' knives in the marble of the tombs. Ignatieff continues,

We stand and sing the viechnaya pamyat, the hymn of memory, the priest blesses the graves and then they leave me alone, with a candle.

Nations and graves. Graves and nations. Land is sacred because it is where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves. The graves were profaned. The butchers slaughtered on top of the marble. A person would fight to stop this if he could.

Looking back, I see that time in the crypt as a moment when I began to change, when some element of respect for the national project began to creep into my feelings, when I understood why land and graves matter and why the nations matter which protect both.

So Ignatieff is not entirely denatured. As an emigre, he might not respond to the Canadian ethnic identity, nor, given his Russian origins, to the Ukrainian. But he has illustrious ancestors. And in the crypt of these ancestors he feels a connection to a larger identity which it is right to defend.